Claire of the Sea Light (23 page)

Now she would have a mother, but not a mother whom she looked like. Only for one moment, for one word (“Vini”), had she had the mother she looked like anyway.

While playing wonn, when she held hands with other girls, either at school or on the beach, when they swayed their arms up and down before taking off in their circle, when they were deciding which way to play or which song to sing, she would always think of the same song. Sometimes she suggested it and it was shouted down, and other times she kept it to herself, and whatever the other girls were singing, she would sing that one particular song in her head. She even sang it when she jumped rope, when no one was singing anything. And whenever she sang it, it was as if someone else were there with her. When there were five other girls playing, if she moved faster than anyone else, she would see seven shadows on the ground.

The other girls didn’t always like this song because it was not a real wonn song. It was a fisherman’s song. Although the melody was cheerful, the words were sad. You never got back
things that fell into the sea. She was surprised that the granmoun, the adults, were not singing this song all day long. So much had fallen into the sea. Hats fell into the sea. Hearts fell into the sea. So much had fallen into the sea. So much could still fall into the sea, including Msye Caleb, who fell in that morning, and all the men like her father who went there to look for fish. She was always afraid that one day she might have to sing that song every moment of every day. Not about a hat, but about her heart, about her father. And this is why she sometimes wished the sea would disappear. If the sea disappeared, she would miss its ever-changing sounds: how it sometimes sounded like one long breath. And sometimes like a cry. She would miss thunderclaps and how the lightning that came with them momentarily brightened the farthest-out reaches of the sea. She would also miss the sea’s colors: the turquoise in the distance and its light-blue ripples up close, the white foam at the peaks of the waves. She would miss the surge of high tide and the retreat of low tide, the milky or rosy clouds of dawn and the orange mists of sunsets. She would miss driftwood, sea glass, seashells, especially the baby ears and buttercups. She would miss throwing stones into the sea and seeing how far they would go. She would even miss the slimy seaweed that the sea spewed out, more during the warmer months of the year. She would also miss smelling the sea, which sometimes reminded her of wet hair. Sure, if the sea disappeared, there might be no fish to eat and she might not be able to lie on her back in it and look up at the hills from the water and sometimes see the magic of how it
could be raining up in the hills and be perfectly sunny where she was. But maybe if the sea disappeared her father wouldn’t have to go there anymore, and the crazy waves might not get him like they got Msye Caleb. There were more seas elsewhere, and if he left her, he might go to these other seas. They might be even stronger, crazier, more powerful seas than the one outside her front door. But in those other places he might have a bigger boat, one that was big enough for the two of them to live in, and she might be able to go with him wherever he was going and there they would live together where the crazy waves would not get them. And maybe if she sang this song all the time it would keep bad things from happening and it would keep her father from leaving, and if he stayed, from dying in this sea. But during those times when she went in and lay on her back, her face aimed at the sky, while he was in another part of this sea, someplace where she could not spot his boat, she hoped that if the sea disappeared at that moment, she would disappear with it too, and she wouldn’t have to miss him and he wouldn’t have to be sad and she wouldn’t have to wonder all the time where he was chèche lavi, looking for a better life. But what if there was no better life? How could he not know this? How could granmoun, grown people, not understand such things? How could they not understand everything?

She had somehow tonight convinced the other girls to sing the Lasirèn song for the wonn. It was her birthday, she had told them. She was seven, she had told them. The oldest girl let her pick the song. They’d groaned when she said it,
but they knew it was coming and they were prepared, and as the adults gathered around to mourn Msye Caleb, she and her friends sang that song until they were hoarse, circling until they were dizzy. And though she wanted to stop after a while, she did not want them to stop and not begin again with the same song, so she tried to hang on. It was the best seventh-birthday gift they could give her.

When Madame Gaëlle arrived, Claire somehow knew that she’d interrupt their game. And sure enough, as soon as they saw Madame Gaëlle, the other girls stopped circling and took the opportunity to escape from Claire and her song.

She could tell by the look on Madame Gaëlle’s face that she had something in mind. Madame Gaëlle wanted something from her. And the only thing she had that Madame Gaëlle might want was her. It was also what her father wanted, for Madame Gaëlle to have her. At first, she was frightened by Madame Gaëlle’s approach, at the careful way she moved in her direction. It was unusual too for a lady like Madame Gaëlle to be out in a fancy party gown with her hair rollers and with slippers on her feet. Something about Madame Gaëlle’s mission must be pressing. At first Madame Gaëlle seemed to creep up on her, then she hovered over her, as though she were building up enough courage to ask a simple question that other adults often asked her, “Is your papa here?”

She had to look up into Madame Gaëlle’s face to answer. She didn’t want to, but she had to because of the sounds of the waves and all the people visiting Madame Josephine, and whenever she was nervous her voice wasn’t so loud anyway,
so Madame Gaëlle wouldn’t be able to understand her unless she was looking straight into Madame Gaëlle’s eyes.

She wished she could explain to Madame Gaëlle before answering that she was not trying to be disrespectful by looking into her eyes. She knew that looking into an adult’s eyes was as disrespectful as whistling in public or making ugly remarks about someone’s mother. So instead of speaking, she nodded her answer.

Madame Gaëlle walked away, over to a big rock, then motioned for her to come and sit on another rock, next to her. She looked past Madame Gaëlle, wishing that her father could see them from wherever he was. She had not seen him for some time, but seeing her and Madame Gaëlle together would bring him running over for sure.

Before starting the wonn, she had hidden her sandals near the rock where Madame Gaëlle was now sitting. Maybe this was some sign. Maybe her sandals had chosen Madame Gaëlle. Her father would certainly see it as some kind of sign if she told him that Madame Gaëlle had come to sit where she had hidden her sandals. Maybe she should be saying something now. But she didn’t know what to say and Madame Gaëlle didn’t seem to know what to say either, because Madame Gaëlle didn’t talk for a long time, but Claire could feel that Madame Gaëlle was watching her the way her father watched her. She took her time slipping on her sandals, not knowing how to make Madame Gaëlle’s staring and not-talking stop. Then she heard Madame Gaëlle say, “I knew your mother.”

Of course Madame Gaëlle had known her mother. Everyone
in town, it seemed, had known her mother. Everyone, except her. She knew this the way she knew everything else, by hearing bits of things adults said to one another when they didn’t think she was listening. Besides, her mother and Madame Gaëlle’s daughter were buried together in the same part of the town cemetery where she had gone that very morning.

But wait. Was Madame Gaëlle going to tell her something about her mother that she’d never heard before, that extra thing she often wished her father would tell her? Had Madame Gaëlle wrapped a piece of her mother, an invisible piece, in an invisible box, that she now wanted to open for her to visit? Were her mother and Madame Gaëlle friends? Is that why Madame Gaëlle had nursed her that one time, making Madame Gaëlle, as her father liked to say, her milk mother? She wanted to hear more. What could she do to hear more? She raised her head and looked directly into Madame Gaëlle’s eyes. It was not disrespectful if it was urgent, if you wanted something and couldn’t ask. It was not disrespect. It was curiosity. It was like Madame Josephine, who, because she could not speak, had to look in the faces of all people, even the white doctors at Sainte Thérèse when they were trying to talk to her about her leg. But white people didn’t care if you looked into their eyes—that’s what the people who’d seen them up close at L’hôpital Sainte Thérèse said. The white people there actually wanted you to look into their eyes. That’s how they claimed to know you were being honest. So she was now looking into Madame Gaëlle’s wild, mournful eyes and she
was pretending that Madame Gaëlle was one of those white people who didn’t care if you looked into their eyes, even as a stream of words came pouring out of Madame Gaëlle’s mouth.

“Your mother had sewn so many things for you,” Madame Gaëlle was saying, but in a jumble, as if to herself. “She had sewn little dresses for you even before she was pregnant with you.” Then Madame Gaëlle said something about God. No, not God, God’s hands. Her mother, Madame Gaëlle said, had stolen her from God’s hands. “And then you were born,” Madame Gaëlle said, her voice clear now. And the revenan talk, Madame Gaëlle was saying she didn’t believe in that. But she believed in birthdays, she said, and she wished Claire bòn fèt.

Claire wanted Madame Gaëlle to keep talking about her mother. But Madame Gaëlle stopped talking. Instead Madame Gaëlle smiled, showing some perfect-looking and long white teeth. Then, as though this were a revelation even to herself, Madame Gaëlle said, “Your mother
was
my friend.”

Since people said that she and her mother looked so much alike, maybe that’s why Madame Gaëlle wanted to be her friend too. And why her father wanted her and Madame Gaëlle to be friends and for Madame Gaëlle to take her.

Tell me more, she wanted to say. Please tell me much more. Open that invisible box with the invisible mother and let me see what is inside. But Madame Gaëlle did not say more. Her smile faded and her face dimmed as if something puzzling were coming into her mind, and she frowned as
though the thing that had entered her mind were something that she was trying to make sense of, that she was trying to understand. And Claire now imagined that there might be a similar look on her own face, because she too was trying to figure out whether Madame Gaëlle was now upset. Or maybe Madame Gaëlle was thinking about her daughter. Madame Gaëlle smiled again, as if something had been decided in her mind, and Claire suspected that perhaps Madame Gaëlle’s smile was meant to keep her from worrying, and maybe her father had been watching them from somewhere, because at that moment he rose out of the shadows and suddenly he was standing over them, and his shadow covered Madame Gaëlle’s body.

Her father had been drinking a little, most likely with the other fishermen around the bonfire. He didn’t drink often and never drank a lot, but when he drank he was never happy. She knew most adults got happy when they drank kleren. They laughed and danced by themselves and told jokes. But her father became even quieter when he drank. He became sadder too, as sad as when he was standing at her mother’s grave.

Her father’s feet seemed to be failing him, as if he were tired of standing over her and Madame Gaëlle, and he sat down on the sand between them. Her father and Madame Gaëlle each seemed to be waiting for the other to talk first, so Claire went back to tugging at her sandal straps and picking tiny grains of sand out from beneath her toenails. While her father had his face turned toward the lighthouse and the hills, Madame Gaëlle said, “Tonight, I take her.”

Could it be as simple as that? One day she was her father’s daughter and the next she was Madame Gaëlle’s? And could this really mean that her father was going away for good and that she would never see him again? Would he even come back, like her relatives from the hills, to bring her yams and breadfruit at Christmas?

Her father seemed surprised to hear that Madame Gaëlle was looking to take her that very night. Maybe that’s how it was when you got something you’d always wanted but thought you would never get. Maybe her father would be just as shocked when he went somewhere else to live, only to find that chèche lavi, the life he had spent so much time looking for, was no life at all without her.

She tried her best to fight back her tears, kept her hands to her sides as long as she could so her father and Madame Gaëlle would not see her wiping those tears, but the tears came anyway.

“Why now?” her father asked. But why not now, if he was planning to give her away anyway?

“Now or never,” Madame Gaëlle said. And Claire wondered what this meant. Was this the last time the three of them would be together?

Claire looked past Madame Gaëlle and her father, over at the crowd of people still gathered around Madame Josephine. Most of them had known Msye Caleb, just as most of them had known her mother.

She wondered whether her mother would have been able to do what her father was doing, if she would have had the
courage to give her away like this, to someone else. She knew of both fathers and mothers, fishing families, who had given their children, both girls and boys, away. They had taken their children to distant relatives in the capital to work as restavèks, child maids or houseboys. Others had taken their children to the white people at Sainte Thérèse and the white people had put the children in orphanages. Some of those children were taken to the capital and other places and were never seen or heard from again. They became other people’s children in other lands that they’d never even known existed.

At least she would be staying here, and if her father didn’t leave, if he gave up on chèche lavi elsewhere and stayed in Ville Rose, she could visit with him now and then. He would have more time for visits too, because if she was living with Madame Gaëlle, he wouldn’t have to work as hard. He wouldn’t have to worry about her as much.